


Love and Memory

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, angsty, canon era AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-04-04 08:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4130446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if during the battle against the giant automaton in Clockwork Prince Tessa had been seriously injured? </p>
<p>This story imagines Tessa waking up with almost no memories to discover that Will has told everyone that they are engaged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She lay in the hospital bed with her eyes moving under her lids like she was only dreaming and he sat beside her. When no one else was around, he laced his fingers with hers. He had left her when he went to see Magnus and hadn’t left her since. He had left Magnus’s townhouse staggered and pained and broken and he’d come back to her because she was the only place he wanted to be.

There was no reason to leave any more. If she woke to find him hovering over her, worried and half mad with guilt that he hadn’t been able to do more to protect her, if she woke to that and found herself thinking that maybe he looked at her like that because he cared for her, it couldn’t hurt her anymore. She could look at him and smile and he wouldn’t have to say something to wipe it away.

“I need you to wake up because I can’t do this without you,” he whispered to her. He had dreamed of what it would mean, to be a good person again, to say kind things, to do good things just because it might make someone happy and every one of those dreams had featured her. This person he imagined he could be was a person he thought she might like.

Jem sat with her sometimes and Sophie too. There was so much else going on that no one could stay long but Will came back every moment that he could. If they lost the Institute, he had convinced himself that he would find a way to keep her safe.

When the threat came, when Benedict Lightwood said, “Once we’ve taken over the Institute, she’ll recover and we’ll find her a place of employment. Talents like those must have uses,” Will had done something.

Will had opened his big mouth and blurted out that they were engaged and had been keeping it a secret. Jem stared at him like he’d grown an extra head but he’d already said it and it couldn’t be taken back. It was inexcusable. When she woke up she was going to kill him. He hadn’t done it quietly. She was going to wake up backed into a corner. The scandal of a broken engagement or the prospect of marrying him without so much as being asked.

Tessa didn’t wake and the world kept turning. They found the way around it all and Charlotte didn’t lose the Institute and Will could have kept his stupid mouth shut.

But he hadn’t.

And then, weeks later, she woke up.

Tessa woke up disoriented and asking where she was. She stared and she frowned but she ate and she sat up and she spoke. It was Jem who talked to her first. Will wasn’t there when she woke. His sister had arrived at the Institute only two weeks before and he’d been with her in the training room, arguing about letters and throwing knives. As soon as Sophie had arrived and told him, he’d came running. Cecily wasn’t far behind him. She had been desperate to meet this mysterious unconscious girl who had won over her brother.

“Your fiance’s here,” Jem said with just a hint of sarcasm when Will arrived. It was as though he could see through Will’s facade or maybe because he thought the idea of Will getting married was absurd or maybe he was hurt that Will hadn’t told him. It didn’t really matter. This was the point at which his ridiculous story fell apart. Tessa would laugh and tell them all that it was wrong to call Will her fiance and she could barely tolerate him.

“I have a fiance?” she asked instead. Her voice was small and confused. She looked up with eyebrows drawn in confusion and her fingers twisted in the blanket. Jem’s sarcasm vanished like a pebble dropped into water. It had been meant for Will, not for her and he sat down beside her. He dropped himself onto the rickety little chair beside the infirmary bed and took her hand.

“Tessa,” he said and she looked away from Will. She had been staring and he hadn’t been able to do more than stare back at her. She looked down at Jem’s hand and then up at his face as he said, “Tessa, tell me everything you remember.”

She frowned and looked away from him, not at Will, at the wall. She was only sixteen and in that moment looked even younger. A little girl in a hospital bed. Will wanted to go over there and wrap her up in his arms and hold her safe but he was frozen. She swallowed and started to speak a few times before giving up and whispering, “I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry, it will come back,” Jem said to her and then she looked up at Will with big eyes and held out a hand to him. He was a liar and a monster but Jem had just told her that he was her fiance and she reached for him because your fiance is someone you can trust. Jem left her side and Will took his place. He was a fraud. He had prepared himself for her to call off the wedding she’d never agreed to, to slap him for saying it at all, to be angry and hurt that he had manipulated her while she was dying.

He was not in the least prepared for her to wake up with shattered memories and believe him.  He took her hand and held it between his while his mind turned like a water wheel. Round and round and going no where. How did he fix this now?

“I don’t remember your name,” she whispered to him like she was embarrassed by it. She gave him a tiny smile and how much he loved her clawed its way through all his guilt and shame and pushed all the breath out of his chest. He sucked it back in around the heavy flailing thing that must have been his heart. 

“My name is Will,” he said smiling at her and for the first time, for the first time since he’d met her, he let everything he was feeling show in that smile. She returned it. She smiled at him like she loved him too. She only loved him because Jem told her that she did, because Jem had introduced him as her fiance, and she had already decided that she trusted Jem. Jem was the type of person you trusted as soon as you saw. Will was not.

Cecily wormed her way onto the bed to sit there in her Shadowhunter training gear and peer over Will’s shoulder at Tessa. Tessa looked up at her with curiosity in her eyes but no questions yet.

“So you’re going to be my sister-in-law?” Cecily asked and the scope of Will’s lie hit him again. He had said it for all the right reasons. It had been a good plan, it would have kept her off the streets. But now. Now it was a lie that was stretching bigger and bigger. He could imagine Cecily telling this lie to their parents. It was all made worse because it was a lie he was telling to a vulnerable girl who didn’t even remember her own name.

It was Jem, as always, who came to his rescue and shuffled everyone away. Jem looked back with a harder look in his eyes than was usually there and then closed the door behind Cecily. Will was left with the girl he loved more than air who kept touching his fingers and flashing him little smiles. She looked at him like she loved him because he was lying to her.

“You didn’t agree to marry me,” he said when they were alone.

“No?” she said, “Was it arranged? I suppose that means my family approves of you.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said with a rueful laugh and she reached out to push his hair away from his face because when he looked down it fell in a wave into his eyes. His whole body felt the contact. This was months of dreaming made real. She was pale and drawn but she looked at him like she loved him and it felt so real. It felt so very very real. He wanted this so much it hurt.

“I mean to say, you don’t remember anything, you shouldn’t have to… Until you remember, everything, until you remember everything, I’m not your fiance. I’m just a friend who cares for you,” he said. It was almost the truth, almost enough to undo some of the damage.

“Are you going to take me courting all over again?” she asked.

“Would you like me to?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said with a little laugh as she looked down at her hands again. They sat for a moment in the quiet of the infirmary before she held up her hand and said, “I don’t have a ring.”

“I’m a Shadowhunter,” he said and he pulled his family ring off his finger and held it up, “I’m supposed to give you this to wear up to the ceremony where we exchange runes, not pieces of metal like mundanes do.”

She surprised him by reaching for it and he pulled it back and curled it into his palm. She laughed like he was playing a game and he raised his eyebrows at her. She was still smiling as she reached out and wrapped her hands around his. He didn’t open his fist but he let her draw his hand in. He smiled as widely as she did. It was like it was contagious, he couldn’t look at her and not smile. Her hands were small and warm and not nearly strong enough to open his fingers.

“I want my ring back,” she said to him.

“You have to agree to marry me before I’ll give it to you,” he said.

“I’ve already agreed to marry you,” she said.

“You have? Tell me about the proposal, how did I ask?” he said.

She sighed and laughed and tried one more time to unwrap his hands. Her tongue poked out between her teeth and her fingers trying in vain to pull his apart.

“Very well, so I don’t remember agreeing to marry you but I am sure that I did and I am sure that I will again,” she said then a little shadow of doubt crossed her face. It was not what he expected when she said, “Why would you want to marry me? You’re beautiful and I’m not like you.”

She still held his fist in hers and she turned it to trace the voyance rune on the back of his hand with her fingers. He had let his walls down too far and now there was nothing between his sanity and this pounding fluttery warmth in his heart. Her fingers on his hand were intimate. She could have been running her hand over his bare chest and it couldn’t have brought out a stronger reaction. His stomach tightened and his breathing changed and keeping still and pretending this was normal took all his practice at lying.

“Because you’ve pieced that together without being told. You are smarter than most people. You’re more compassionate as well. Kind when you have every reason to be hard and bitter. You are kind even when people don’t deserve it and you are honest. I am not honest and I see your honesty and it makes me want to be better. You are my warrior queen, my Boadicea, braver and stronger than a thousand men. I love you for all the reasons that a man can love a woman and for all the reasons that make no rational sense. I love your hair when it falls in curls. I love the way you can say complex things with just your eyebrows. I love your name. I love your eyes. I love the way you argue with me when you think I’m interpreting a novel wrong. I committed to memory every word you have ever written and dreamed of a lifetime of words yet spoken,” he stopped himself there. He had let it go on. He had started to ramble.

He closed his eyes and her hands were still wrapped around his, holding tighter than she had before. He tried to steady himself before he said something else mad and unwelcome. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to his mouth. He started and pulled back. She looked at him with wide eyes and parted lips.

“I cannot remember every word ever said to me, but if you have said even a fraction of that to me before, I know why I agreed to marry you,” she said with just a touch of anxiety. She had kissed him and he had jumped away like she had burned him. He felt guilty for a new host of reasons.

Not only for jumping away but because he hadn’t and she hadn’t and her words reminded him. She had never agreed to marry him. He had never given her words of love. He had told her she was barren and inhuman and unworthy of love. He had called her ungraceful and strange and disparaged every book she had recommended for him. He had read every one in secret and tried to see them the way she did but he hadn’t ever told her any thing like this before. He had built them up, day by day by day, he had assembled the words as though organizing them would make it easier to suppress them.

“I love you, Tessa Gray,” he said to her and he pulled her hands towards him and kissed her knuckles. “I love you and I will earn this trust you have in me. I swear, I will be worthy of it.”

She smiled at him like she already loved him and he kissed her fingers again and dropped his head so she couldn’t see his expression as it fell to pieces. Guilt and love and hope and horror and unnameable desire.

“I love you,” he said one more time and she touched his hair again, running her fingers through it and pushing it away from his face. He hid his expression by keeping his lips pressed to her fingers and his eyes on the blanket.


	2. Chapter 2

Jem watched them. Tessa kept leaning in as she watched Will read. She had graduated from the infirmary to wearing a tea dress and sitting up in the drawing room though she retreated to bed often. She was recovering but it was slow. Will read aloud to her and she smiled the entire time. Sometimes she read along with him, silently following the words on the page, sometimes she watched his face. Her fingers played with his family ring which he still wore on his own hand but which Jem had heard Tessa jokingly call ‘her ring’ because she expected it to be returned to her.

He could still remember his ring on her finger and the way she’d gotten comfortable wearing it and had forgotten to give it back right away. She had been his fiance for only a few days and he couldn’t shake the memory loose.

When Tessa got tired, Will walked her back to her room and left in her Sophie’s hands. Jem tried to let it all go but he couldn’t. He climbed out of the chair he sat in and went after them. Jem found Will in the hall near Tessa’s room looking at a tapestry without seeing it.

“I need to speak to you,” Jem said.

“Certainly,” Will said but he hesitated before following Jem into the music room. Jem closed the door and stood and stared at his own hand on the handle for a few moments before he turned and looked at Will. Will had always been easy to understand. Will lied. Will said whichever story made him look worst. Will was cruel and rude but this was well and truly beyond anything he had done and it didn’t make sense. His kindness and his warmth and the way he looked at her didn’t make sense.

“Are you playing with her?” Jem asked.

“Excuse me?” Will asked.

Jem closed his eyes so that he didn’t lash out. Lashing out at Will was never the right thing to do. Will was tense and guarded and everything he hadn’t been while Tessa had her fingers on his and commented on his choice of poem. Jem took a very long deep slow breath before he spoke.

“The first true interest you ever showed in that young woman was when you declared you had engaged yourself to her,” Jem said. “Whenever did you court her? However did you convince her to marry you?”

“I didn’t,” Will said and dropped himself into a chair.

“You didn’t,” Jem kept his voice flat.

“I said that because the Clave couldn’t put my fiance out on the street without doing the same to me. I thought we were going to lose the Institute. I thought it was the only way to save her,” Will said. His expression twisted into something sad and hurt, “She doesn’t like me. She barely tolerates my presence in a room. I have said inexcusable things, done inexcusable things. Now she believes we are engaged.”

“And  you’re perpetrating the lie,” Jem said. He still stood by the door. His hands were tightened into fists. The girl who had kissed him, had wrapped herself up in his arms and called him beautiful was engaged to his best friend because of a complicated lie.

It wasn’t even a case that she had chosen Will over him. That would have been more tolerable than this. He had expected that. For a long time, he had expected that. Girls always let their gazes rest on Will and never move away. It was expected. But Tessa, Tessa had seen him. She had seen him and now she couldn’t remember it. He loosened his hands. It wouldn’t do to make a scene.

“It would be a scandal,” Will said. “She barely remembers her name and I’d pitch her headlong into a Clave scandal that might still land her on the street. She hasn’t got anyone, Jem. I told her that she must accept me again, that I won’t be more than her friend until she is recovered. Is that enough? Is it better if I leave her? You’re the one to ask. You’re the one who can tell right from wrong. You make the right decision, always. Is it better to leave her?”

Jem was not the one to ask. Jem wanted him to leave her because then she could see him again. If she went back to hating Will then she could be his. And he would die and she would be a widow by 20. He closed his eyes and crossed the room by memory to sit down across from Will. He opened his eyes to find Will leaning forward, earnest and honest and desperate for an answer.

“Don’t abandon her. She’s only just found out that she’s an orphan. Stay until she asks you to go. But Will, she needs someone who will love her. If you cannot give that to her. If you are going to go out and prowl the streets and call her a barren whore to her face-” Jem stopped because the anger had crept into his voice and he needed to smooth it out again.

“You heard that conversation?” Will asked sitting back.

“She told me of it,” Jem said.

“I said it but I didn’t mean it. Please listen, let me tell you why, I was as I was. I will be better. I will be better for her and for you. Please believe that James,” Will said.

Jem let Will take his hand and tell him a story of curses and Ella Herondale and the cross country flight of a broken hearted little boy to London. He’d always known Will was better than he pretended to be but to have it laid out like this was a kind of heartbreak but it wasn’t the one that rippled through his chest and left him silently struggling to breathe.

The truth was that Will could make her happy.

He could stand with her for a lifetime. Will was worthy of her. Jem let the shreds of hope that she might somehow come home to him fall away. His heart had been held together by those shreds and it shattered now. He was going to carry the memory of her voice soft and fierce while her lips were against his and her fingers were on his ribs to his his grave. Maybe it was better that it was a short trip.

“Do you love her?” Jem asked when the story was all told and the questions all asked.

“More than I thought I could ever love another person. I thought I couldn’t love anyone. I went to find that demon, to break that curse just for the chance to tell her. I wasn’t even sure that the damage I had done could be repaired. I love her. I love her so much Jem, I don’t have the words to explain it,” Will said.

“You don’t have to, I promise,” Jem said but he didn’t say why. He didn’t tell Will that he loved the same girl for all the same reasons and understood how it felt. He couldn’t put that knowledge on Will. It wasn’t Will’s to bear. Tessa deserved someone to love her that much for a lifetime. He had known she deserved better than him. He hadn’t known how close she was to having it.

“William, if you are going to be anything less than the man she deserves, leave now. If you are ever cruel to her, ever, know that you will lose my friendship along with her esteem,” Jem said. It was more of a threat than he had ever uttered to Will. He softened his expression before he said, “Please take care of her.”

"I swear it. Every day of my life,” Will said.

Jem tried to gather up the sharp little shards where his heart had been and tell himself that this was the best possible scenario. That this was good and right and better. But they wouldn’t be gathered. His heart needed time to grieve this loss even as his head worked so hard to believe that it was better like this. He left Will in the music room and stopped outside Tessa’s door long enough to lay his hand on the wood and say a silent farewell.

Then he went into his own room and tried to pour some of this unfathomable feeling out into the violin.  


	3. Chapter 3

Tessa held her clockwork angel tight against her chest when the rushes of memory went by. Like birds released from a cage, fragments of memory swept past her and she could catch no more than impressions before it was over.

The memories were shattered and fragmented. They were the sound of explosions and a weight against her and blood. They were a lonely violin melody and huge expanses of water off the bow of a ship. A tiny kitchen where someone was teaching her to dance. A woman’s voice reading scripture. The smell of rum and shoe polish. They were Will catching her hand in his. Will’s knuckles white on a railing. Will sneering. Will looking at her with panicked relief on his face. Hands on her skin. Jem washing dirt from her ruined finger nails. Will’s face and sharp pain like her heart was breaking.

She thought she had made sense of some piece and then it would fall away. The brother she adored with his blonde hair and his bright smile was an enemy and a dead one at that. Her aunt was dead but she didn’t remember it happening. She kept coming up with revelations only to find that they were wrong. It left her feeling lost.

Will brought her back. He was her solid ground amid shifting sands. Once this rush of memory quieted again she got up and went to find him. He sat with his feet up on an ottoman in the drawing room and he grinned at her when she entered the room. Jem was sitting across from him and gave her a quick, almost sad smile. That wasn’t right somehow. That wasn’t how he looked at her but she wasn’t sure what it was that was missing.

Will slid over so she could have the nearer seat and she sat down with them and smiled. Nothing made sense in her head and there was a monster of a man out there who wanted to kidnap her and make her is wife for some purpose no one fully understood but at least she had friends. Jem gave them a smile and then left. She was always disappointed when he did but she was starting to get used to it.

“Isn’t it indecent to be left alone together?” she asked Will.

“Are you planning on assaulting my virtue?” Will asked with wide affronted eyes and his hand to his breast. These flashes of humour were one of her favourite things about him. She felt like she spent most of her time adding to that collection of favourite things. His eyes. His reading voice. His smile. His memory for poetry. The way he fussed at his sister. The list kept growing.

“Tell me about our first kiss,” she said.

“Trying to collect the important memories?” he asked.

“I’m starting to get little pieces back I’m trying to make sense of them,” she said reaching out and picking up his hand off his knee. He smiled at her whenever she touched him and she returned it as she settled in with his hand held in hers.

If she were honest, she had started this conversation because she wanted another kiss. She wanted a full memory to go with the little flashes of feverish skin under her hands and breath on her neck. He was so careful with her and she wanted to find that other person in him. The one with hands on her waist and kisses hard enough that she could feel teeth. She wanted more than fragmented memories.

“I was half drowned in holy water,” he said with a laugh. She was surprised that she didn’t remember that. She frowned a little trying to find a memory to go with that.He hadn’t been wet in the fragments she had. 

“Not the same memory?” he asked.

“No,” she said shaking her head. Looking for it finally brought a flash of visual, Will with his shirt wet enough that she could make out the runes where the fabric clung to his skin. She couldn’t remember the kiss itself but even remembering him looking like that made her blush. He reached out and touched her cheek which made her blush harder.

“Perhaps not,” she said.

“The balcony then?” he said, “Sneaking out of a masquerade ball we shouldn’t have been at to get some air?”

Will was watching her with a smile on his face but she couldn’t pull that memory loose at all. It certainly wasn’t soft sheets and the smell of something both sweet and acrid. She leaned in against his shoulder. She so rarely had him alone enough to do things like this. It isn’t proper to touch a gentleman like this, to put your head on his shoulder and close your eyes like you could make the world disappear. Maybe she could pretend that she didn’t remember that kind of etiquette, put the amnesia to good use.

“Tell me that story. All of it,” she said breathing in the smell of him. Will wrapped an arm around her and she sunk in a little closer. He told her about her brother and changing into Jessamine and sneaking away, about faerie drinks and his fingers in her hair. She listened with her eyes shut. It wasn’t nearly as frivolous and romantic as she was expecting but maybe the best stories were more complicated than just kisses at parties.

There was a sound at the door and Will released Tessa so she could sit up straight again. Sophie came in to straighten the room and remind them to get ready for dinner. Sophie didn’t seem to approve of their engagement and Tessa hadn’t managed to get the courage up to ask why.  

After dinner, Will and Henry left for a patrol. Tessa slowly climbed the stairs to the training room just to see it would jog loose any more memories. It had been mentioned at dinner that she and Sophie had been training before she had been injured. She stood in the center of the huge space with its soaring ceiling and tried to call up a memory. Any memory.

She found nothing. She went over the the wall of weapons and ran her fingers down the hilts of swords and over the fletching of arrows but it didn’t help. The smell of leather was just the smell of leather. She looked at the small dagger she had lifted off of it’s rack and spun around and flung it at the wall in frustration.

“If you throw it pointy end first, it’s more effective,” a voice by the door said and she jumped. She hadn’t realized she wasn’t alone. Jem stood in the doorway with a small smile on his face as though watching her fling daggers across the room was hilarious.

“I wasn’t trying to kill anything,” she said.

“Would you like to?” he asked.

“Kill something?” she asked, “Perhaps the thing that took my memory but I hear that is already done.”

“I meant would you like to learn to throw it properly?” Jem said. He crossed the room and picked up the dagger from the floor. He was tall and thin and his complexion made him ghostly. He set her on edge but not in any way that made her feel unsafe. It was more a nervous energy than a fearful one.

“Yes, I’d like that very much. I was hoping that I might remember something up here,” she said. He gave her one of those sad, kind smiles she was starting to expect from him. He put her dagger away and got out knives he claimed would be better for learning to throw with, explaining things in a quiet even voice the entire time. She followed him to a small table by a wall with a target on it.

He showed her how to do it and when she tried to mimic him, she dropped the knife. Her next two attempts weren’t any better.

“Did I used to know how to do this?” she asked.

“You were better than this but not yet an expert,” he said. She fumbled the hold again and stared down at the knife in frustration. She was already frustrated, why had she thought trying to learn something new and difficult would be a good idea.

Jem came over and very gently, like he was afraid to touch her, adjusted her fingers on the hilt. He was never close to her. She looked at him, he was still talking in that soft, measured voice like he was weighing each word before he released it. 

This close he smelled like burnt sugar.

And that smell set the memories loose in a torrent. Standing beside him and looking down at water. His voice sure and reassuring and not nearly so careful as he said, “The right man won’t care,” though she didn’t know why he’d said it. Him sitting up in bed, looking drawn and ill, telling her a story that she couldn’t remember but had broken her heart.

His hair between her fingers, his mouth on her collar bone. His voice angry and hurt and then not. The memory of the kiss, the one that she couldn’t reconcile to Will, was a memory of Jem. Jem beautiful and vulnerable, demanding and gentle, thin but so much stronger than he looked.

“Tessa?” he said. She’d gone slack beneath the onslaught of fragments, all fragments of him. She’d let go of the knife and he was taking it away from her. He held onto her hand and touched her face with the back of his fingers like he was checking for a fever.

She exhaled hard but couldn’t pull air in. He pulled her over to a bench seat below one of the tall narrow windows and pushed her down onto it. At some point in the process, his hand was briefly at her waist and that made the issue of breathing harder.

She shut her eyes and waited. He was talking, asking her questions, worried. She followed his voice back until she met his wide silver eyes, his eyebrows drawn together in concern. Not thinking, not quite capable of thinking yet, she reached up and touched his hair. He startled but didn’t pull away as she ran the piece over his forehead through her fingers. He was a statue below her hand, even his eyes stayed locked on her.

It took her a few attempts to get the words out, “I kissed you once.”

He sighed and looked down and then back up. She watched him, reevaluated him. His sad smiles. His careful distance and too polite speech. Her hand slid down the side of his face and held him there for a moment.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

“No,” he said with more force than she expected, “No, Tessa, no. You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing. It was before you and Will… There’s nothing for you to regret. I promise you. It was once, we were both upset and you needn’t worry about it.”

“Does he know?” she asked. Her hand was still against his face and he was leaning in, just a little bit, as though he were hoping she wouldn’t notice it.

“No,” Jem said.

“I am sorry,” she said again and when he started to protest again she put her hand over his mouth and he fell silent immediately, “I broke your heart, I’m sorry for that. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember why I chose him over you but I am sorry I broke your heart.”

Jem clenched his eyes shut like he was trying to block her out or hold back tears and then he leaned in until their foreheads touched. She dropped her hand and closed her eyes. The world narrowed down to the place where he was touching her, forehead to forehead and his knee against hers. She breathed in that familiar sugary scent and waited.

“I meant it Tess, you have nothing to be sorry about. I could never marry you,” he said and her stomach churned, twisted sideways with an emotion that hurt, “I won’t make it to see my twentieth birthday. You know that, someone’s told you?”

“Yes, Charlotte did,” she said without opening her eyes.

“I would be a terrible choice for a husband. It would be unconscionable for me to even pursue it, even if Will didn’t love you, even if you didn’t look at him like he’s the brightest star in the sky,” he pushed a piece of hair back from her face, trailing fingers along her skin as he hooked it back behind her ear. She didn’t remember meeting him and this good bye was shredding her heart.

“Jem,” she said though she wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask or what she needed to say.

“I will always care for you and I will be here to help you as long as I can, I promise that. Promise me that you won’t go regretting things that barely happened,” he said.

She pulled back and looked at him. He was smiling but it wasn’t covering the sadness as completely as he must have wanted it to. She frowned at him. She turned over each little fragment of that night that she had and didn’t bother trying to fit them together, just let herself remember each one while she looked at him.

“I do not regret it,” she said holding his gaze and trying to put enough feeling into the words to explain what she meant. Then she dropped her gaze and pulled another deep breath full of the scent of him into her lungs. She looked up again and said, “I need to go, Will will be back and I promised him that I would have tea with him before I went to bed.”

She stared to lean forward and stopped herself before she did something unforgivable like kiss him again. She touched his cheek again, just one more brush of finger tips to store away with the other memories before she got up and hurried out of the room. She wanted to be alone before the tears started.


	4. Chapter 4

She came to stand beside him and she rested her elbow against his. It was barely a touch but it made Will grin. She wore yellow today, looking bright and cheerful until he saw her expression. Serious. His grin faded but he couldn't wipe the smile off his face entirely. He raised his eyebrows at her in a question. 

"You were never kind to me, you were never kind to anyone," she said and the smile dropped off his face but she hardly seemed to notice, she kept talking, "It's like there are two people and yet they both wear your face. There is you. You with your smiles and words of encouragement and all your little jokes. And then there is the other you. The one who Sophie warns me of, who once said something to me that was so horrible, I felt ill. I can't remember what it was, only that you said it. You had gripped the railing so tightly your knuckles were white before you said it. I don't remember the words only that I stomped away before I cried." 

"I remember," Will said softly. 

"Are you going to be that person again?" she asked turning away from him to look at the library below them. They stood on the second floor. He had been leaning against the rail with a book in hand until she'd come in. Now she leaned her against the rail with her elbows locked and her fingers tight on the polished oak. 

"Never again," he promised. "Come here, I'll explain it." 

He held out his hand and she took it which made him smile all over again even if this might be the last time she ever trusted him so easily. He was going to tell her and then he wasn't sure she'd ever be able to look at him again. He was a liar. He was a liar but the only way to be anything more was to ruin this and hope that he would be able to rebuild something on any truth that would be left in the rubble. 

There was a window seat that overlooked in interior courtyard and he led her over to it. She leaned past him to look down at the little overgrown garden for a moment before sitting down beside him and taking his hand. As she always did, she ran her finger over his family ring before looking up at him. Her hair shone in the late afternoon light sneaking in from the window and he smoothed a piece back into place just to have an excuse to touch it. 

"Mr. Herondale?" she asked, a little teasing. 

"My sister died when I was twelve," he said instead of answering that smile. The words had built up and he needed them out. It came out in a torrent. The story of Ella, of the demon, of his flight to London, and of the years living under the curse. He concentrated on her hands in his and the way they tightened as he talked because it kept him from feeling like he was losing his grip on the world. 

"And then when it was gone, all I could think of was telling you but I came back from Magnus's that night to find that you still hadn't woken. Everyone spoke in soft voices and it wasn't certain that you ever would. You lay in that bed and didn't move more than your eyelids," he said. 

"Oh Will," she said leaning her head in against his shoulder and closing her eyes. He kissed her forehead. 

"I never asked you to marry me," he said into the silence. He tilted his head back and rested it against the window behind them and spoke to the ceiling. This was the part where he destroyed it and he had never wanted to keep a secret more. 

"What do you mean?" she lifted her head but he didn't look back down at her. He wasn't brave enough for that. 

"I never asked you to marry me. I declared that we had been keeping our engagement a secret. I thought Charlotte would lose the Institute and I couldn't bear the thought of you being left unconscious and vulnerable and under Benedict Lightwood's dubious protection. If you were my fiancé, they couldn't throw you out. They'd have to debate the possibility of allowing me to marry you. You'd be protected. I didn't think it through. I should have considered what it would mean. And then you didn't remember. You didn't remember and you held onto me like I was your only safe harbour in a storm and I was afraid of taking that away from you," he said. 

"You never asked," she said. 

"And you never agreed, and I don't know how to fix it now. We can break the engagement, of course we can, if you want to, we'll do it immediately, I would understand, but it will be public and I don't know if that would be better. I will do whatever it is that you want. I will follow you wherever you want to go or I will never bother you again," he stumbled through the words. 

"Why did you do it?" she asked.

"You had lost everything," he said. 

"So it was all some chivalrous attempt to protect me. It wasn’t, you don’t," she pulled in a ragged breath and said in a perfectly calm voice, “You wouldn’t have asked otherwise.” 

Her hands were still tangled in his, holding tighter and he finally looked down at her. Her face was turned up, serious and wary. She hadn't looked at him like that in so long and his heart shattered. He would not cry but he wanted to. Her voice was flat and soft. He stared at her and memorized every detail.

"The first time we met, you hit me with a vase and then proceeded to argue about the temperature of hell while we ran for our lives," he said and she frowned but he kept speaking. If he was going to tell the truth, it would be the entire truth, "I may have fallen in love with you at that moment. Then there were the letters. You had written them to your brother while you were held in that place and we read them because we needed to know whether you yourself were dangerous. I have them. I have read them over and over and over. Every beautiful word, I had never seen myself so clearly in another person. I had never understood another person’s words or stories the way that I understand yours.”

She stayed silent so he kept talking. The silence was painful and he needed to fill it. 

"There was a day when I thought you had died,” He paused and took a deep breath, "There was so much blood and I knew. In that moment, I knew that I loved you though it must have began long before then. I would have asked, you never would have accepted me but I would have risked anything on the sliver hope of even  telling you." 

Will turned to her. Her mouth hung open just a little bit and her eyes were wide. Radiant but no longer wary. He had braced himself for anger and heartbreak. He had prepared himself for her to throw things at his head and hate him the way she had after he'd last broken her heart. Then it had been words of scorn and abuse but now he'd dressed up his betrayal in pretty language like that could make it lesser. 

"Why did you lie to me?" she asked in a soft voice. It wasn't anger but a dark feeling settled into his chest. She wasn't going to hate him but she wasn't going to be able to trust him either. It was a different kind of pain and he swallowed around it.

"I-" he started but he had run out of words. 

"I would have understood. I lost my memory not my mind, I could have understood it Will, you could have told me," she said. 

"It wasn't that you wouldn't have understood," he said, "I know that you can make sense of anything, even things I can't hope to fathom. I am - and you should know this - I am impossibly selfish. All I had wanted for so long was for you to smile at me and mean it and here you were lighting up every time I entered a room and I wasn't sure how to ruin that. I wasn't strong enough to let it go. I wanted so deeply to be engaged to you, I convinced myself that it was the right course of action."

"You have changed your mind," she said. 

"I was lying," Will said, "I have been lying for years to everyone and in everything. I cannot do that any more and I certainly cannot do it to you. I love you, Theresa Gray, I love you and I cannot hold my own happiness higher than yours. I will not build any more of my life on lies. I want you to have the truth. If you are to know me, then know all of me. I will answer any question. From this day forward, you may ask any question and I will tell you the honest answer." 

She watched him. Not wary but curious. He held her gaze. She hadn't sent him away yet and that was more than he could have hoped for. She reached out, slow and tentative, and ran her fingers from his temple to his jaw. He didn't breathe as her palm came to rest against his cheek. She pulled him in and he just held her gaze until her eyes fluttered shut and he realized what was happening. 

The kiss was gentle. 

Her chin tilted up and she cradled his face in her hands as she pressed her lips to his. He held still until she moved her mouth against his. He kissed her back, reached for her and found her already halfway onto his lap and into his arms. She looped her arms behind his head and kissed him harder. The little voice, the one that always told him he was taking advantage tried to whisper doubts to him. 

This time he ignored it. 

She knew all his secrets now and for reasons he wasn't entirely sure he understood, she was pressed into him and murmuring against his lips. He slid his hand up her back and as he pulled her in closer, he could feel her smile. She kissed him and pulled him in against her and kissed him again. 

"I love you," he said it over and over again between kisses. He kissed her eyelids and her forehead and her mouth and the side of her throat. 

"Will?" she said and he pulled back from the crook of her neck to smile at her. She smiled back. Shy but not tentative, a grin that broke across her face before she could reel it back in to give him a more serious look. His arms were around her waist and her skirts were spread around them. He'd pulled her collar askew and her hair was tumbling down around her face because something they had done had knocked it loose. 

"Yes?" he said as his lip quirked into a smile all on its own. 

"Ask me," she said. 

"Ask you? Ask you what?" he asked still smiling but only paying the littlest bit of attention to the words he was saying. She was too close and it was playing havoc with is ability to think. 

"Anything you want," she said but her tone was significant. He drew back and considered her. She gave him another smile and he kissed her. He kissed her quickly before he scooped her up off his lap and stood her up beside him. She laughed and tilted her head back to look up at him. 

Will considered her for a moment and then kissed her forehead and then knelt down before her. She tried to keep a straight face but her smile kept tugging up the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were soft and he forgot that he was supposed to say something. 

"Miss Theresa Gray, it would be the greatest honour of my life if you would accept me as your husband," he said and he tucked the ring she was always asking him for into her palm as he did then he stood up and put his finger against her lips. He moved so fast she jumped and would have pulled back if he wasn't still holding her hand. 

"But I want you to be completely and utterly sure. Please make this decision carefully, take as much time as you need, I am not an easy person to love. Even on my best days I am not as simple or as good as you deserve," he said. 

"You are very easy to love," she said and his finger was still against her lips. 

"No, I am not, you just have a generous heart," he said, "And know this Tess, my heart is yours. All of it, every corner is yours and will be yours as long as you want it. Make this decision for yourself and what you want. Your heart is your own and I will no longer run off with it like a highwayman."

"I know my answer," she said. 

Will watched her unfold her hand and turn the ring in her palm. He watched her smile and slip it onto her finger. His heart hammered in his chest. She held up her hand with the ring on her finger and he gave her his so she could lace her fingers with his. She pulled him back in for a softer kiss. 

“Of course, I will marry you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to write an CP2 epilogue style final chapter to this but I like how it ends on the Wessa note here so I'm leaving it as is.

**Author's Note:**

> This whole thing began with a dialogue prompt over on tumblr: "You need to wake up because I can’t do this without you." 
> 
> I write drabbles that become multi chaptered fics because I have no concept of brevity.


End file.
